Building a project management site

[guancharlie25]

Hi guys, I'm a young web development student, and my boss recently asked me to design a site for project management. He said that he's ok with it being done in Wordpress.

Right now, I've finished listing a few project goals but have not yet created milestones of when I expect to get a set of goals done.

I just want to get the site up and running, and to be able to make an easy to use log entry system for employees at my workplace to log what they've done on a calendar.

Anyways, I was wondering if any of you had any advice or tips on project management.



We've looked at basecampHQ, but basecamp doesn't really offer the customizability of a site built for one's own company.


I'm going to uninstall and transfer the latest backups of my e-commerce site to my hdd, then I will install wordpress using something like softaculous. Then I will try out a wordpress plugin for project management. Hopefully it works

We are a large company, and I just want to build the first milestone of the site using free hosting for now before I transfer everything to a paid site. I want to get the first milestone done and show it to my boss so we can talk about the possibilities of continuing down this path or trying something else.

The employees using the site will primarily be doing office and construction work.
I will be making the site on my own, and I have the rest of the summer to finish the site.

[SJ.Wolfe]

Alright, first off, let me say this: Do NOT install Wordpress using softaculous. Do it manually via FTP, by downloading it from here: http://wordpress.org
Softaculous has been known to completely botch software installs. Also, if you do use wordpress, I would recommend using the wp-supercache plugin to help prevent any high resource usage suspensions that may arise if you're planning to use the free hosting service.

Anyway, as far as I know, everything you've mentioned (Except for the posting to a calendar part - I'm not certain if there's something that exists for that) can be done with Wordpress. It's just a matter of finding the right plugins, and knowing how to think outside of the box.

You could also look at a content management system (CMS) like Joomla, although I personally have little experience in that software.

[guancharlie25]

Thank you wolfe,

I doubt we will run into any high resource suspensions, so I will hold off on using supercache.

Right now I am looking at Joomla. I remember using it before, but never knew it could be used for project management.

I will go install wordpress through ftp after this.

edit:
Actually I found a great extension for joomla called thinkery projectlog
I think I will try it out, but I'm afraid that it will be hard to edit the extension. If this happens, I may switch to wp.

edit: scratch that, I found the install page, but it looks hard. I'll take a risk and use install software.
As per your advice, I am installing through ftp.

[essellar]

Take the high resource thing seriously -- WordPress is a notorious system hog. You don't need a lot of users or data to hit the limits on free hosting here; WordPress touches everything, everywhere in order to serve a page. Any additional modules you install will make the application that much more "chatty" (and you do need plugins to make a project management framework out of WP). Anything that does decent PM is going to have multiple process flows with timeline dependencies, so that means a potential flurry of SQL queries with every change -- and that, too, can trigger a HRU suspension, even if all you're doing is a proof-of-concept demo with a small set of dummy data.

I'd look at something designed from the ground up as a PM solution; something that doesn't come with WP's "all things to all people" baggage. Something along the lines of dotProject, php-collab or phpProjekt (in roughly that order). All three of those are FOSS (free and open source software).

[guancharlie25]

Thank you for the reply.

I am no longer using wordpress at the moment, but two replies saying the same thing, I will install wp manually if I need to. Wordpress doesn't require linux commands to install like joomla does.

I am using joomla. Again thanks!

[SJ.Wolfe]

Alright, no problem. And trust me, you will get the random HRU, even if you're the only user accessing the site and are messing with the ACP. I've had the system suspend me from trying to log in once XD